Combining Silverlight and Windows Azure projects
Standard Silverlight applications require that they be hosted on HTML pages, so that they can be loaded in a browser. Developers who work with the .Net framework will usually host this page within an ASP.Net website.
The easiest way to host a Silverlight application on Azure is to create a single web role that contains an ASP.Net application to host the Silverlight application. Hosting the Silverlight application in this way enables you, as a developer, to take advantage of the full .Net framework to support your Silverlight application. Supporting functionalities can be provided such as hosting WCF services, RIA services, Entity Framework, and so on.
In the upcoming chapters, we will explore ways by which RIA services, OData, Entity Framework, and a few other technologies can be used together. For the rest of this chapter, we will focus on the basics of hosting a Silverlight application within Azure and integrating a hosted WCF service.
